Teaching Philosophy

Volume 30, Issue 1, March 2007

A Framework for Facilitating Classroom Dialogue

Classroom dialogue can be democratic and evidence critical and creative thinking, yet lose momentum and direction without a plan for systematic inquiry. This article presents a six-stage framework for facilitating philosophical dialogue in pre-college and college classrooms, drawn from John Dewey and Matthew Lipman. Each stage involves particular kinds of thinking and aims at a specific product or task. The role of the facilitator—illustrated with suggestive scripts—is to help the participants move their dialogue through the stages of the framework and to model and prompt good social and cognitive dialogue moves within each stage, until the participants learn to become self-managed.